Speakers

In alphabetical order, these are the speakers and panelists scheduled for the three main speaker tracks at HOPE Number Nine. Many other people will be doing presentations, teaching workshops, and participating in numerous unscheduled events. Join them, July 13-15 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. View the HOPE Number Nine Speaker Schedule to see talk titles, abstracts, and the conference schedule..

aestetix used to think he was influenced by the wise words of sages like Joseph Campbell and Robert Heinlein, which led him to work on identity-related projects like OpenAMD at previous HOPE conferences. But then, he met the Big Bad Google Plus, which taught him that he didn’t even exist.

Mitch Altman is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone remote controls, a keychain that turns off TVs in public places. He was also co-founder of 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), did pioneering work in virtual reality at VPL Research, and created the Brain Machine, one of MAKE Magazine’s most popular DIY projects. For the last many years, he has been on the road from hackerspace to hacker con leading workshops around the world, teaching one and all to make cool things with electronics and teaching everyone to solder with his open source hardware kits. Mitch is one of the co-founders of Noisebridge (a San Francisco hackerspace) and president and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.

Chris Anderson is an assistant professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island and a visiting fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He was an organizer and editor with New York City Indymedia from 2001 to 2008 and helped found the inaugural NYC Grassroots Media Conference in 2004.

Gus Andrews is the producer of The Media Show, a YouTube series on digital media literacy. She has been a contributor on Off The Hook, a user researcher for Second Life, and a writer for publications from Bitch Magazine to io9.com. Her dissertation and postdoctoral research were on blog comment threads gone horribly, horribly wrong; examples are up at gumbaby.com.

Maggie Avener is an engineer and trainer at the Prometheus Radio Project. Her job involves troubleshooting technical issues with community radio stations, creating tools to make it easier to apply for radio licenses, and teaching hands-on soldering workshops to introduce people to the technology behind radio.

Lee Azzarello strives to help the Internet continue as a democratic medium for free expression well into the future. He works with The Guardian Project to help users ensure their right to privacy when communicating online with their mobile handsets and tablet computers. His specialty is VoIP architecture, operating systems, and web application backends.

Mark Belinsky is an entrepreneur and technologist who has developed projects at the intersection of media, tech, and data in over 26 countries. Currently, he is a creative technologist fabricating security tools with The Guardian Project and building international movements with purpose. In Armenia, Mark co-founded and is a board member at BEM, a youth action center that serves as a platform for building an active civil society through media, performance, and citizen journalism. He is co-founder of and advisor to Digital Democracy, a nonprofit that empowers marginalized communities to use technology to build their futures around the world. He directs and produces films and designs interactive media projects with his company New Words Media.

Katherine Bennett is an artist who widens notions of habitable spaces: involving the intangible spaces within the mind and the liminal spaces created by digital communities. Katherine uses sound and light as visceral material to foster relationships across these spaces, creating a presence across the trajectory of time. Her work studies the terrain of memory: its absence, degradation, and the new space that this loss provides for new experiences. Her latest environments investigate the development of social networks, and experiment with interaction thresholds. She uses sound and light, facilitated by programming, to create interactive and responsive installations.

William Binney served in the secretive National Security Agency for over 30 years, including a time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Based on his experience and background, he estimates that the NSA has put together over 20,000,000,000,000 (20 trillion) “transactions” - phone calls, emails, and other forms of data - from Americans, including potentially almost all of the emails sent and received from most people who live in the United States. By coming forward to expose these abuses and provide evidence to the public and the media, he displays those qualities that so many in the hacker community strive for: courage, standing up to authority, revealing the truth, and honoring the rights of the individual. We’re honored to have William Binney as one of our keynote speakers this year.

Tommie R. Blackwell is CEO of Creative CYNERGY, and the former senior vice president of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center/Space Camp. She also served as chief educator for the creation of the worldwide GLOBE program for the White House.

Matt Blaze directs the Distributed Systems Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches academics to be hackers and hackers to be academics.

Sean Bonner is a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, journalist, activist, and enthusiast. Currently, his time is split between Safecast (an open global sensor network currently monitoring radiation levels in Japan), Neoteny Labs (an early stage consumer Internet startup fund focusing on Southeast Asia), and Coffee Common (a customer education brand collaboration launched at TED 2011). He is one of the founders of Crash Space (a Los Angeles hackerspace) and has been a regular contributor to BoingBoing.

Griffin Boyce is an independent researcher and frequent volunteer for anticensorship projects. His research has focused on communication, privacy, and transgender health. Currently, he is working on how AIDS researchers can effectively collaborate for a public health nonprofit.

Stephen Bruckert is a writer, filmmaker, artist, and performer. He loves his dogs, the Internet (which, like soylent green, is actually people), and his wife. His first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 color computer and sometimes he misses having a modem. He is one third of MemeFactory.

Willow Brugh is the director of Geeks Without Bounds, an accelerator for humanitarian projects. Previous endeavors include being co-founder of Seattle makerspace Jigsaw Renaissance, the hackerspace collaboration initiative Space Federation, and the response-development competition GameSave. Years of participation in the hacker and makerspace community have created purpose towards distributed systems, engaged citizens, and mutual aid. With heavy involvement in Maker Faire, Random Hacks of Kindness, and the SpaceApps Challenge, Willow’s main skill is “getting out of the way.”

David Calkins is the president of the Robotics Society of America, the founder of RoboGames, an educator, and event organizer.

Micha Cardenas is an artist/theorist who works in performance, wearable electronics, hacktivism, and critical gender studies. She is a PhD student in media arts and practice at University of Southern California and a member of Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. Her book, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, published by Atropos Press in 2012, discusses art that uses augmented, mixed, and alternate reality, and the intersection of those strategies with the politics of gender in a transnational context. Micha’s local autonomy networks (Autonets) is a project focusing on creating wearable autonomous local networks that don’t rely on corporate infrastructures to function.

Nicole Carroll is a classically trained electroacoustic composer, who also works with video and handmade electronic instruments. Through her music and video works, Nicole seeks to build relationships with audiences though multidisciplinary art experiences. She utilizes circuitbent toys and hacked hardware in performance to provide a visual element to the electroacoustic performance process. Her compositional focus is exploring sonic and artistic possibilities, while presenting material in a manner that is accessible to her audiences. She freelances as a sound designer for theater in Brooklyn, and builds custom midi controllers and hacked instruments for electronic musicians and digital media artists.

The Cheshire Catalyst (Richard Cheshire) was the last editor of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the 1970s and 1980s. (TAP was a predecessor of 2600 Magazine.) In his “share the knowledge” spirit, he has volunteered at every HOPE conference since the first one in 1994.

Sandy Clark (Mouse) has been taking things apart since the age of two, and still hasn’t learned to put them back together. An active member of the hacker community, her professional work includes an Air Force flight control computer, a simulator for NASA, and singing at Carnegie Hall. She is currently fulfilling a childhood dream, pursuing a PhD in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania. A founding member of TOOOL USA, she also enjoys puzzles, toys, Mao (the card game), and anything that involves night vision goggles. Her research explores human scale security and the unexpected ways that systems interact.

Ben Combee is the developer architect for the Enyo JavaScript framework and one of the key contributors to the Open webOS project. Over the years, he’s worked on IC design, compilers, developer tools, mobile devices, operating systems, and open source hardware.

Greg Conti is director of West Point’s Cyber Security Research Center. He is the author of Security Data Visualization (No Starch Press) and Googling Security (Addison-Wesley), an EFF Favorite Book, as well as over 40 articles and papers covering online privacy, usable security, cyber warfare, and security data visualization.

Jorge Cortell (FallenAngel) studied computing, among other things, at Oxford University, among other universities. He lectured in “intellectual property” for five years at Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain) until he was forced to resign due to pressure from the MPAA and the Spanish Collecting Societies over a lecture on free culture and peer to peer networks. He then decided to start a free music company, which he sold to start his multinational free software company (Kanteron Systems), and specialized in health care IT.

William Cromar is an architect, animator, and musician who has exhibited his work nationwide since 1983. The recipient of a silver medal at the 1983 International Biennial of Architecture in Sofia, Bulgaria, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Samuel Fleisher Art Memorial Challenge Exhibition, and was a finalist for the Pew Fellowships in the Arts. He currently teaches at the Abington campus of Penn State University.

Catherine Crump is a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. She litigates cases challenging the constitutionality of government surveillance programs. She is currently litigating two cases challenging the government’s policy of engaging in purely suspicionless searches of laptops and other electronic devices at the international border. She has testified before Congress and is regularly quoted in the media about surveillance topics, and is both on the adjunct clinical faculty at NYU Law School and is a fellow affiliated with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

Matt Curinga is an assistant professor and director of the program in educational technology at Adelphi University. He is developing a new graduate program in educational technology with a focus on open education.

Da Beave (Champ Clark III) is a founding member of telephreak.org. He has authored books for Syngress and is probably more well-known as a VoIP hacker. He also runs the public access Deathrow OpenVMS cluster.

Daravinne is a ten year veteran of 2600 and HOPE conferences, and is known to publicly associate with the Noisebridge and site3 hackerspaces. She has had a long private battle with PTSD type II, anxiety, depression, and other trauma issues. Dissatisfied with the (lack of) societal and professional support available to people with these problems, she feels it is very important to start changing that.

Simone Davalos is a professional robot combat referee, plays with robots for a living, enjoys setting things on fire creatively, and, in the off season, actively pursues her hobby as a low-level bureaucrat for RoboGames and other Robotics Society events.

Patrick Davison is pursuing his PhD in media, culture, and communication from the Steinhardt School of NYU, where his research focuses on network genres. He is one third of the Internet performance group MemeFactory. He lives in Brooklyn and likes indie games and indie girls.

Eric Davisson aka XlogicX holds an AA in criminal justice, a BS in computer engineering, and an MBA. He has a computer security day job and owns the phx2600.org domain. Eric is interested in obscure languages like whitespace, brainf**k, and non-0x86 assembly. If there’s a well-known hack, he’s not very good at it, and the only thing he’s ever over-clocked was a TI-82.

Robin DeBates is chaos wrangler and treasurer for Jigsaw Renaissance, a Seattle area member-based makerspace. A hobby scientist who likes to put pointless LEDs in clothes, make stars in the microwave, and grow bioluminescent algae in her free time, Robin is a clinical social worker by training, providing emergency mental health services in King and Snohomish Counties.

Bill Degnan is a former IBM technician, owner of an ISP and computer repair store, and serves as an adjunct professor of computer history at the University of Delaware. He’s also CTO of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists).

Johnny Diggz is an entrepreneur, musician, filmmaker, and founder of Geeks Without Bounds. In 1995, he co-founded IRDG (Intergalactic Research and Development Group), which built the world’s first Internet-based unified messaging platform, iPost. In 1999, he co-founded Voxeo Corporation and serves as chief evangelist for Voxeo Labs’ flagship cloud communications platform, Tropo and its community of over 250,000 developers. He produced the indie feature film, The Karaoke King, a musical comedy that premiered in 2007 at the Cinema City International Film Festival. Johnny is also a professional dueling piano player and will perform at the slightest arm-twist.

The Doctor is a system architect and system administrator working for an aerospace engineering firm in Washington, DC. When not building or repairing servers, he’s aiding dissidents in the Middle East as an agent of Telecomix, working on projects at HacDC, contributing to Zero State projects, traveling through time and space inside a funny blue box, or consulting in the private sector. He is one of the core developers of Project Byzantium.

John “Cap’n Crunch” Draper was among the first people accused of using a blue box to essentially get “root” access to the entire Ma Bell telephone monopoly. He later went on to write a word processor program, some of which was written while he was in jail, and beat out Bill Gates by negotiating a software bundle with the first outside software sold for the IBM PC. He is currently working on a book, Hack This Life.

Christina Dunbar-Hester is an assistant professor of journalism and media studies in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She is completing a book manuscript on low power radio activism in the United States.

JP Dunning is a security consultant and researcher. His research interests include wireless and portable security. He is the primary developer on Katana: Portable Multi-Boot Security Suite. He maintains www.hackfromacave.com for publishing projects and research.

Hanni Fakhoury is a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focusing on the intersection of technology and criminal law. Hanni previously worked as a federal public defender in San Diego for close to four years, where he served as a copy editor for the 2010 edition of Defending a Federal Criminal Case. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and Pacific McGeorge School of Law, where he was elected to the Order of Barristers for his excellence in written and oral advocacy. Hanni is a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Peter Fein is an agent with Telecomix, an ad-hoc volunteer disorganization of Internauts who support free communication. He also helps Anonymous cause a ruckus from time to time. Peter is a programmer with expertise in Python and distributed systems, and a frequent conference speaker. He is currently developing Mirror Party, a distributed censorship-resistant mirror network.

Matt Fiddler is a registered locksmith, CISSP, and director of international information protection for a large financial services organization. He has extensive expertise in the area of Unix and network engineering, security consulting, computer forensics, and intrusion analysis.

Eva Galperin is an activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she does education, mobilization, and outreach on all things related to digital civil liberties. Prior to EFF, Eva worked at the U.S.-China Policy Institute, where she helped to organize conferences and research Chinese energy policy. She has bachelor’s degrees from SFSU in international relations and political science, which she is continuously astonished to find useful on a daily basis.

Emmanuel Goldstein has been publishing 2600, hosting the Off The Hook radio program, and coordinating HOPE conferences for longer than he’d care to remember. He currently has no certifications, a fairly worthless bachelor’s degree in English, and he’s never even taken a course in computers. He also has a few issues with authority and authority has many issues with him. To this day, the wonderful world of social engineering provides him solace.

Alvaro Gonzalez (AndOr) is a systems and network specialist who has been involved in Hacklabs, Hackmeetings, LAN parties, Copyleft, and wireless groups in Spain for almost a decade. In the last ten years, he has been specializing in new techniques on scientific imaging. Currently, Alvaro is the CTO at Kanteron Systems.

Travis Goodspeed designed the hardware for The Next HOPE badge, as well as an exploit for Microsoft keyboards that runs on the badge. He attends far too many conferences and is alleged to have used a SCADA exploit to produce an abundance of neighborliness in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Bitcoin will break if his name or Ben Bernanke’s is removed from blk0001.dat.

Ivan Greenberg wrote The Dangers of Dissent (2010) and Surveillance in America (2012), published by Lexington Books. He earned a PhD in history from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the Arse Elektronika festival in San Francisco, host of Roboexotica (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and co-curates the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna. Recurring topics in Johannes’ artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.

John Linwood Griffin works in industry (research fellow at TeleCommunication Systems, with a focus on computer and communications security) and academia (assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University, with a focus on computer storage systems). Since finishing graduate school at Carnegie Mellon in 2004, he has also worked in security research and development groups at IBM Research, at BAE Systems, and at a startup company he founded. Outside of work, he enjoys cooking, singing baritone in semiprofessional classical choirs, and, most recently, taking lessons towards a private pilot certificate.

Haxwithaxe is a hacker, developer, outdoorsman, HacDC member, software developer, and a live distro and OpenWRT firmware developer. He is a fixer of things... because he breaks them....

Tim Heath aka crashcart is an employee of Meatstand, a van aficionado, and a hacker. He is a member of Makers Local 256, a Huntsville hackerspace.

Alexander Heid is a security researcher, board member of HackMiami, and co-chair of South Florida OWASP. He has worked within the defense and financial industries, providing information security consultation services.

Parker Higgins is an activist and blogger at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, focusing on issues around privacy, freedom of speech, and intellectual property. Along with Trevor Timm, he operates the @drones Twitter feed.

Marcia Hofmann is a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she works on a broad range of digital civil liberties issues including computer security, electronic privacy, and free expression. She currently focuses on computer crime and the EFF’s Coders’ Rights Project, which promotes innovation and protects the rights of curious tinkerers and researchers in their cutting edge exploration of technology. She is also a non-residential fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining EFF, Marcia was staff counsel and director of the Open Government Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). She is a graduate of the University of Dayton School of Law and Mount Holyoke College.

John Huntington is a professor of entertainment technology at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) in Brooklyn. In addition to being a show control geek, he is a weather weenie, and blogs about both topics at www.controlgeek.net.

Tim Hwang is chief scientist at the Pacific Social Architecting Corporation, a Bay Area research and development house focusing on technologies to enable precise, large scale social shaping online. He is also the founder of ROFLCon, a series of conferences that bring together Internet celebrities, commentators, and scholars to talk about memes, Internet culture, and funny cats on the web. In the past, he has worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is an avid collector of Sky Mall magazine.

Jeremiah Johnson (Nullsleep) is a computer musician and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work explores the politics of appropriation, failure, and the tension between order and chaos through creative (mis)uses of consumer electronics and elements of early Internet vernacular. He is the founder of the 8bitpeoples low-tech audio/visual collective, a member of Computers Club Drawing Society and Phone Arts, and co-curator of Blip Festival, an event taking place annually in New York, Tokyo, and Melbourne.

Matt Joyce is a former federal contractor, having worked on the Nebula project at NASA Ames Research Center. The Nebula project is responsible in part for the Apache 2 licensed OpenStack project. Today, Matt works at Cloudscaling, a startup centered around the open source cloud infrastructure market.

George Keller is a retired U.S. Navy cryptologic officer, who was stationed at many sites around Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States, including the NSA. He is also a retired tech maintenance supervisor at CBS in New York and a ham radio operator.

Joe Klein is an IPv6 SME, scientific hooligan, triathlete, and photographer. For the last seven years, he has participated in the development of security standards for IPv6, based on his experience implementing systems, networks, and applications.

Nadim Kobeissi is a computer security researcher and Internet freedom advocate based in Montreal. He developed Cryptocat, an open source, accessible web IM client, and also hosted CHOMP.FM, a radio show covering information freedom, Internet privacy, and cyberculture with guests such as Bruce Schneier and Electronic Frontier Foundation staff. Nadim also has an interest in penetration testing and has regularly defended Internet freedom issues such as the SOPA blackout and WikiLeaks in the media.

Evan Koblentz is a technology journalist and computer historian with expertise in the history of portable computing. He is president and co-founder of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists).

Joshua Kopstein is a computer culture journalist and electronic musician. Currently a reporter for The Verge, his progressive writings (“Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How the Internet Works”) advocate DIY culture and open source technology as a vehicle for radical sociopolitical reform. Since 2008, he has explored and exploited the unique musical capabilities of antiquated video game consoles, combining primitive computer sequencing with tape loops and improvised electronics. As Zen Albatross, he has performed in cities across the United States, as well as at New York City’s annual chip music event, Blip Festival.

Chris Kubecka is an information security professional with 15+ years of experience and multiple professional certifications. She currently advises and consults for government agencies and international organizations. Her research involves smartphone, web and asset vulnerability testing, malware, forensics, incident handling, covert communications channels over HTTP(S)/DNS, correlation engines, and everything security log related.

Adam Langley works on both Google’s HTTPS serving infrastructure and Google Chrome’s network stack. From the point of view of a browser, he’s seen many HTTPS sites getting it dreadfully wrong and, from the point of view of a server, he’s part of what is probably the largest HTTPS serving system in the world.

Phil Lapsley has spent the last several years documenting the history of phone phreaking, through hundreds of interviews and Freedom of Information Act requests. When not researching phreaking, Phil has tried to act like an upstanding member of society. He co-founded two high technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and worked for McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm that advises Fortune 100 companies on business strategy. He co-developed Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP, RFC 977) used in the USENET news system. He is also the author of one textbook, 17 patents, and numerous technical articles. He lives in Bangalore, India.

Robert Leale has worked on in-vehicle network communications for over seven years. In this time, he has reverse engineered vehicle network communications for the purposes of integrating new features or functions to vehicles by means of already existing infrastructure.

Micah Lee is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s web developer. An avid GNU/Linux user, he has been writing code in a variety of languages for a variety of platforms for over a decade. He takes a keen interest in computer security, cryptography, privacy, Free Software, and Internet freedoms.

Wil Lindsay is a hacker, performer, media artist, and educator residing in central Pennsylvania. His recently successful public projects include: oneString, an open source USB synth controller; the Bliptronome, an open source port of the Monome controller to a $50 toy; and YM-MINI, a DIY synthesizer based on the sound chip from the Atari ST. He was the first artist-in-residence at Philadelphia’s The Hacktory, and has performed many hardware-based 8-bit media performance at festivals and shows under the pseudonym VBLANK. His work can be found at www.straytechnologies.com.

Kirsten Lindsmith is a college student, studying to become a coroner. She may look like our token “pretty young woman on the spectrum,” but she writes columns for WrongPlanet.org and for AutismAfter16.com. She and Jack Robison were the subjects of a lengthy article in The New York Times in December 2011, and she is a co-host of Autism Talk TV.

Jaime Magiera is the founder of Sensory Research, an organization of engineers, designers, and artists dedicated to providing useful tools, services, and ideas to augment human interaction. Most recently, his work has focused on developing interactive systems for creative self-expression, education, and physical rehabilitation.

Cayden Mak is a theorist, activist, and media practitioner. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in media study at the University at Buffalo. His research interests focus on radical pedagogy, large scale games, play as a tool for social engagement, and Marxist video game aesthetics.

Ana Martina is the technical and training coordinator at the Prometheus Radio Project. She has volunteered in autonomous spaces and independent media sites and conferences as a media trainer, with the objective of providing support to radio enthusiasts in using free open source software to produce their programs.

Amelia Marzec is a Brooklyn-based artist focused on enabling activist communities through innovative uses of technology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in design and technology from the Parsons School of Design, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, and was awarded a residency at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. She is a recipient of the Paul Robeson Cultural Center Award. Her work has appeared in the Conflux Festival, Rhizome ArtBase, Flux Factory, Neural Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, Gizmodo, Wired, Make, and on NPR.

Far McKon is a developer of software, hardware, and community. He herds some of the nerds at MakerBot during the day, and moonlights as a gardener, bicycle nut, and developer-at-large.

John McNabb is Principal of InfraSec Labs, which researches security issues of critical infrastructures. His talk at HOPE Number Nine is a slight tangent from his current research, which focuses primarily on security issues of the national drinking water infrastructure. John has published several papers on the subject and recently wrote a chapter on drinking water security for the book Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism, 2nd Edition (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Nick Merrill is the founder of the Calyx Institute and the plaintiff in the landmark constitutional law case known as Doe v. Ashcroft (or Doe v. Mukasey, Doe v. Gonzales, or Doe v. Holder), which was the first original challenge to the National Security Letters portion of the USA PATRIOT Act.

Don Miller (NO CARRIER) is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He performs live visuals in real time. Don works with nearly obsolete re-purposed electronics to create high energy low resolution abstract video art. Part of the 8bitpeoples artist collective, he performs, exhibits, and lectures worldwide. In his hometown of Philadelphia, he organizes and curates 8static, a monthly showcase of low-bit music and video. He also serves as a director of Playpower, a nonprofit organization that works to bring low cost educational games to developing countries.

Sean Mills is a writer and graphic designer. His expertise in the field of design is highly regarded and he presented related research at 2009’s Creativity Symposium at Wake Forest University.

Eben Moglen is executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center and professor of law and legal history at Columbia University Law School. He has represented many of the world’s leading free software developers. He earned his PhD in history and his law degree at Yale University during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven. After law school, he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at Columbia Law School since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Virginia. In 2003, he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society.

Catarina Mota is co-founder of the Open Materials project and the hackerspace Altlab, co-chair of the Open Hardware Summit, and a member of NYC Resistor. She teaches hands-on workshops on hi-tech materials and simple circuitry, with the goal of encouraging people with little to no science background to take a proactive interest in science, technology, and knowledge sharing.

Alex Muentz is an IT professional and lawyer. He’s spoken at HOPE since 2006, in addition to a handful of other conferences. When he’s not trying to explain lawyer-y things to hackers or hacker-y things to lawyers, he teaches and practices law.

Chris Naegelin is a technology and security hobbyist who enjoys free and open access to information and dislikes the use of acronyms. He has previously worked as a federal employee for the U.S. government, managing security and compliance programs and has worked as a security consultant for BearingPoint and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Deborah Natsios is an independent scholar, architect, and co-founder (along with John Young) of Cryptome (1996), a repository for information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance.

Greg Newby has been engaged in building and giving away technologies and content since adulthood. He volunteers as director and CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. He lives and works in Fairbanks, Alaska. In his spare time, he enjoys excursions with his sled dog team.

Teague Newman is an independent information security consultant based in the Washington, DC and Reno, Nevada areas. He competed in the Netwars segment of the U.S. Cyber Challenge in 2009 and ranked highly in all rounds in which he participated. He is a penetration tester and also a training partner for Core Security Technologies. He has instructed professionals on the topics of information security and penetration testing at places like NASA, DHS, U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, DOE, and various nuclear facilities, as well as at large corporate enterprises.

Deb Nicholson works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She has been a free speech advocate, economic justice organizer, and civil liberties defender. She is currently the community manager at Media Goblin, a decentralized media hosting project. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a nonprofit dedicated to providing tools and education for potential new Free Software contributors and is an advisor to The Ada Initiative, an organization supporting women in open technology and culture.

Brendan O’Connor is a geek of many trades: violin, ham radio, civil rights, and privacy. After growing up in Montana and finishing two degrees at Johns Hopkins, he did DARPA research for a time in Arlington, Virginia before leaving to found his own consultancy, Malice Afterthought - a security research group which recently completed a DARPA Cyber Fast Track contract. After spending six months teaching information warfare for the DoD in 2011, he decided to attend law school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison; he is between his first and second years. He lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin with his two cats, Lysistrata and Deus Ex Machina.

Fiacre O’Duinn has presented at library conferences in Canada and the United States on the impact of emerging technologies on libraries and librarians. He blogs at Library Cult about digital justice, technology, and maker culture. He currently serves as a councilor-at-large for OLITA (Ontario Library and Information Technology Association) and recently co-organized TEDxLibrariansTO, the first TEDx event specifically for librarians and information professionals.

Matthew O’Gorman aka mog is an employee of Meatstand, a new father, and a hacker. He is a member of Makers Local 256, a Huntsville hackerspace.

Deviant Ollam, while paying the bills as a security auditor and penetration testing consultant with his company (The CORE Group), is also a member of the board of directors of the U.S. branch of TOOOL, The Open Organisation Of Lockpickers. At events like DEFCON, ShmooCon, HOPE, and many other cons, Deviant runs the Lockpick Village, and he has conducted physical security training sessions at Black Hat, DeepSec, ToorCon, GovCERT, AusCERT, HackCon, ShakaCon, HackInTheBox, CanSecWest, ekoparty, and the United States Military Academy at West Point. His favorite Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are, in no particular order, the 1st, 2nd, 9th, and 10th

Ray H. O’Neal, Jr. is an associate professor, founder, and director of the AstroParticle and Cosmic Radiation Detector Research and Development Laboratory (APCR-DRDL) in the Department of Physics at Florida A&M University, where he collaborates with young people to pursue detector and sensor research and development for astrophysics.

Jennifer Ortiz is a doctor of pharmacy, recently graduated from Creighton University. She graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a BS in electronic media arts and communication, and a minor in computer science. She worked for five years in web development, then pursued pharmacy.

Meredith L. Patterson joined Telecomix shortly after the Egyptian government shut off Internet access to most of the country, leading a team of European and American ham radio operators in an effort to establish emergency radio communications. Although that operation was ultimately unsuccessful, she stayed on to help with other projects, including tracking down suspicious SSL certificates. She works as a software engineer at Red Lambda and pioneered the field of language-theoretic security along with Sergey Bratus and her late husband Len Sassaman. When not immersed in programming language theory or tech support for the Arab Spring, her hobbies include knitting, target shooting, and auto repair.

Dan “AltF4” Petro is, by day, a security researcher for DataSoft Corp, a small business in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he focuses on developing open source tools for network security. He holds an MS in information assurance from Arizona State University, where he studied network security and cryptographic protocols. By night, he is a rogue free software and privacy activist with a penchant for the dramatic. He is a lifelong hacker and regular member of the Phoenix 2600.

Alex Plank runs the website WrongPlanet.net, which specializes in all things autistic. He is also a co-host of Autism Talk TV, an Internet program sponsored by Autism Speaks.

Psytek is an inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur. He’s CEO and CTO of multiple companies including CoderBounty.com. He co-founded the Alpha One Labs community hackerspace in Brooklyn and is currently making progress on a groundbreaking aerospace transportation vehicle. He’s been a 2600 reader and meeting participant for more than 15 years and is a proponent for hacker culture and community.

QueueTard is trained as a mechanical engineer, and has specialized in manufacturing and semiconductor fabrication. He has worked in multiple “FABs” in a variety of roles from collegiate research to major 22nm and beyond production.

Cooper Quintin is a web developer working for social justice at radicalDESIGNS. He is also an organizer of and presenter at the Hackmeet conference. His passion is merging radical technology and radical politics.

Tiffany Rad is an attorney and cyber security engineer for Battelle Institute in their Center for Advanced Vehicle Engineering (CAVE) in Columbia, Maryland. She is also a part-time adjunct professor in the computer science department at the University of Southern Maine, teaching computer law, ethics, and information security.

Steven Rambam is the founder and CEO of Pallorium, a licensed investigative agency with offices and affiliates worldwide. A memorable presence at all of the HOPE conferences, he is perhaps best known for his pro bono activities, which have included the investigation of nearly 200 Nazi war criminals in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. He has also coordinated efforts to expose terrorist groups’ fundraising activities in the United States and has coordinated investigations which resulted in the tightening of airport security in eight U.S. cities prior to 9/11. Many of his investigations involve coordination with national authorities, and he has received commendations and awards in a number of foreign locations, as well as mention on the floors of the Canadian and Israeli Parliaments.

Michael Rash is author of the book Linux Firewalls: Attack Detection and Response with iptables, psad, and fwsnort, published by No Starch Press, and holds a master’s degree in applied mathematics with a concentration in computer security from the University of Maryland. He is a frequent speaker at computer security conferences, and is the founder of cipherdyne.org, an organization dedicated to open source security technologies. In his free time, Michael leads the development of the psad, fwsnort, and fwknop security projects.

Ray is a hacker and lockpicker from Germany. Besides having the equivalent of a master’s degree in computer science and interests in Unix/Linux security, he’s been collecting and picking all kinds of locks for over a decade and has given presentations in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States on related topics. He’s also a founding member of his local CCC organization and leads his region’s lockpicking sports group.

Dustyn Roberts is an engineering consultant, professor, author, and perpetual student. As a professor, she has developed two courses for NYU’s interactive telecommunications program: Mechanisms and Things That Move (which led to a book entitled Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists), and Biomechanics for Interactive Design. Dustyn holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, an MS in biomechanics from the University of Delaware, and is currently a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and PhD candidate in mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of NYU. She is also the co-chair of the Open Hardware Summit and a member of the hackerspace NYC Resistor.

Quincy Robertson is an information security researcher from the San Francisco Bay Area with a background in networking and Linux system administration. His first foray into hacking was reverse engineering video game save files back in the DOS era.

Jack Robison got in a lot of trouble five years ago for his autistic interest: chemistry. He was found not guilty on all charges and is now a chemistry major in college. He, with Kirsten Lindsmith, was the subject of a lengthy article on young people on the spectrum in The New York Times. He is a co-host of Autism Talk TV.

Mary Robison has a PhD in anthropology and, for the first time in her life, knew that she had found her people at The Next HOPE. Mary had a late-life diagnosis; it was very traumatic. She’s planning on doing some participant observation of hacker culture at HOPE Number Nine. Mary can usually be found in the Hackerspace Village, teaching people how to solder SMDs.

Jimmie Rodgers is a full-time hacker, maker, circuitbender, etc. He designs open source hardware kits, teaches a variety of workshops, and gives talks on many topics that interest him. His most popular kits are the Atari Punk Console (a simple and fun sound generator) and the LoL Shield (an Arduino shield with lots of LEDs on it). Jimmie is co-founder of Artisan’s Asylum, a huge hackerspace in Boston.

Mike Rugnetta is a composer, programmer, and performer. He is one third of the fast-paced performative lecture-giving Internet research team that is MemeFactory. He also hosts a web show for PBS called Idea Channel. This one time while bowling, he got two strikes in a row.

Ed Ryan is a New York patent attorney with a background in physics who deals with technologies including digital broadcast, automotive diagnostics, fiber optic transmissions, semiconductor design, hula hoops, and (omg) software patents.

Sai does a wide variety of things, including Make Your Laws, a practical liquid democracy project; CogSai, a YouTube channel on cognitive science; creating a nonlinear written language; social neuroscience of empathy; and design and programming.

John Sarik is a hardware hacker and PhD student in the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics. His research interests include open hardware for education, printable electronics, and energy harvesting sensor networks. His personal interests include nixie tubes and anagrams.

Molly Sauter is a graduate student in comparative media studies at MIT, and a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. Molly’s research focuses on cultural and sociopolitical analyses of technology, particularly hacktivist technology and tactics, and other aspects of hacker culture and digital activism. Before arriving at MIT, she worked as a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, focusing on Internet law and regulation.

Jason Scott is a historian, archivist, and filmmaker dedicated to preserving all manner of computer and digital history, with a dash of general history on the side. As “free-range archivist” at archive.org, he has been bringing terabytes of material into its ranks, while his own site, textfiles.com, continues to acquire endless amounts of BBS-era artifacts and tales. He has spoken at an awful lot of HOPEs and has always found it the best use of the weekend. He is very old.

Jimmy Shah is a mobile security researcher specializing in analysis of mobile/embedded threats on existing platforms (J2ME, Symbian, Windows Phone, iOS, Android) and potential mobile malware and spyware. If it’s lighter than a car, has a microprocessor, and is likely to be a target, it’s probably his problem. He has presented on mobile threat research at a number of computer security conferences.

Lisa Shay is an assistant professor in West Point’s department of electrical engineering and computer science. She is an electrical engineer and her research interests include sensor networks, privacy, automated law enforcement, robotics, and surveillance countermeasures.

Sitwon is a programmer, hacker, and pirate extraordinaire. He is a member of HacDC, a Linux administrator, and developer, with experience building Live Linux distributions and custom OpenWRT firmware.

Per Sjoborg runs a blog and a podcast focusing on self reconfiguring modular robotics. He also does general robotics interviews for www.robotspodcast.com. Per trained as a mechanical engineer and ran his own programming business for ten years.

Aditya K. Sood is a founder of SecNiche Security Labs and a PhD candidate at Michigan State University. He is an active speaker at security conferences and has already presented his research at over a dozen of them. He has authored papers for HITB e-zine, Hakin9, ISSA Journal, ISACA Journal, CrossTalk, Usenix ;login:, and Elsevier journals such as NESE and CFS.

Space Rogue is widely sought after for his unique views and perceptions of the information security industry. He has testified before Congress and has been quoted in numerous media outlets. He was an early member of the security research think tank L0pht Heavy Industries and helped co-found the Internet security consultancy @Stake. He created the widely popular Hacker News Network, which, not once but twice, became a major resource for information security news. Space Rogue currently works as the threat intelligence manager for Trustwave SpiderLabs.

Robert David Steele Vivas, former spy, honorary hacker, and #1 Amazon reviewer for nonfiction, has also set the world record for Q&A at eight hours and one minute, going from midnight Saturday to 0801 Sunday at The Next HOPE (2010). This year, he was accepted by the Reform Party as a candidate for the presidency. The son of an oil engineer, he has lived all over the world, been a Marine Corps infantry officer, a CIA clandestine case officer, a founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, and a CEO of both a for-profit (OSS.Net, closed in 2010) and a nonprofit (Earth Intelligence Network).

Chris Thompson is a board member of Hive76 in Philadelphia. He is the head of Eagleapex LLC and designer of the math clock and wristwatch at mathclock.com. He was principal of now closed meatcards.com, a site for laser-etched beef jerky business cards. He provides consulting for artists and others about technology and the Internet. He also uses technology to create digital art.

Trevor Timm is an activist and blogger at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he specializes in free speech, privacy, and government transparency. Along with Parker Higgins, he also operates the @drones Twitter feed.

Marc Weber Tobias is a security specialist, principal attorney for Investigative Law Offices P.C., and contributing writer to Forbes. He has authored seven police textbooks, including Locks, Safes, and Security, a primary reference for law enforcement and security professionals internationally.

TProphet has been a 2600 Magazine writer and columnist for two decades. A noted futurist, technologist, and author of the popular quarterly “Telecom Informer” column, he believes in the power of communication to change the world.

Syl Turner is an experienced web developer and the founder of Jokels.com. Syl has produced a variety of web projects beginning with watch-your-step.com in 2000.

Alexander Urbelis is an attorney in the New York office of the law firm of Steptoe and Johnson LLP, where he is part of a team of attorneys who have helped many of the world’s largest technology companies navigate ICANN’s new gTLD program and reshape their Internet policies. For several years, Alex regularly contributed to WBAI’s Off The Hook with Emmanuel Goldstein and has been involved with 2600 since he was about 15.

James Vasile is the director of the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports and incubates a collection of free and open source projects that enable anonymous, secure, reliable, and unrestricted communication on the Internet. Its goal is to enable people to talk directly to each other without being censored, surveilled or restricted. He is also a senior fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center and a partner at Open Tech Strategies.

Charlie Vedaa is a fork and spoon operator for the federal government and runs the online CTF game pwn0.com. He’s living proof that they’ll let anyone present at hacker conferences.

Georgia Weidman is a penetration tester, security researcher, and trainer. She holds a Master of Science degree in computer science, secure software engineering, and information security. Her work in the field of smartphone exploitation has been featured in print and on television internationally. She has presented her research at conferences around the world. Georgia has delivered highly technical security training for conferences, schools, and corporate clients. She recently founded Bulb Security LLC, a security consulting firm specializing in security assessments/penetration testing, security training, and research/development. She was awarded a DARPA Cyber Fast Track grant to continue her work in mobile device security.

Michael Weinberg is a senior staff attorney and innovation evangelist at Public Knowledge, a digital advocacy group in Washington, DC. He is the author of “It Will Be Awesome If They Don’t Screw It Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology,” a white paper that examines how IP law may impact the growth of 3D printing. Although he is involved in a wide range of issues at Public Knowledge, he focuses primarily on copyright, issues before the FCC, and emerging technologies like 3D printing. He also makes videos every once in a while.

Ben Wizner is the director of ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. He has litigated numerous cases involving post-9/11 civil liberties abuses, including challenges to airport security policies, government watchlists, extraordinary rendition, targeted killing, and torture. He has appeared regularly in the media, testified before Congress, and traveled several times to Guantanamo Bay to monitor military commission proceedings.

Tamara Yadao is a sound artist, musician, and experimental composer who employs loose structures in improvisation to investigate meaning in conceptual methods of sound-making. In 2009, at Diapason Gallery, she presented a lecture on “the glitch” called “Post-Digital Music: The Expansion of Artifacts in Microsound and the Aesthetics of Failure in Improvisation.” Current explorations include radio transmission as a performance tool, electroacoustic composition in virtual space, 8-bit sound (under the moniker Corset Lore), and the spoken word. She has experimented with sculptural forms of sound-making in her work. She currently co-curates the word/text/music performance series, TXT FST.

The Yes Men are actually two individuals (Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum) who have caused a significant amount of mayhem within governments and major corporations over the years. They are the ultimate in social engineering, posing as representatives of everything from the World Trade Organization to Dow Chemical, and having the mass media believe every word of it without checking the facts. This allows them to create an “alternative reality,” where corrupt organizations sheepishly admit their failings and guilty parties graciously offer to compensate their victims - until the truth is uncovered and the parties in question must publicly reaffirm their evil ways. It’s all done with a great sense of humor and it’s served as a tremendous inspiration to freedom loving people everywhere. We’re happy to have The Yes Men filling one of our keynote slots this year.

John Young is an independent scholar, architect, and co-founder (along with Deborah Natsios) of Cryptome (1996), a repository for information about freedom of speech, cryptography, spying, and surveillance.

Andrew Cameron Zahn is a multimedia artist and designer living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His most recent project, HackPhilly, was a juried design and art exhibition for hackers. HackPhilly took place during the 2012 Philly Tech Week festival. Andrew produces experimental interactive sites, applications, installations, and instruments that bridge the gap between art and design. His work was recently featured in the “Making IT” juried art exhibition in Philadelphia.